World of books

Tonight I shall be speaking at the Royal Geographical Society at Kensington Gore, London SW7, to raise money for Venice in Peril. There's going to be a debate on the motion "Enough money has been spent saving Venice", with appalling suggestions made by those who support the motion, including the idea that the city should be taken over by Disney. If you want to come to the debate, you'd be contributing (£20 a ticket) to this excellent cause that is Venice in Peril (details at www.intelligencesquared.com).

Naturally, in preparation, my thoughts have been turning to those great writers, English and otherwise, who have been drawn to Venice and found it to be their inspiration.

When Byron stood on the Bridge of Sighs, he felt "A thousand years their cloudy wings expand / Around me, and a dying Glory smiles / O'er the far times, when many a subject land / Look'd to the winged Lions' marble piles / Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles".

Byron lived in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, surrounded by his magnificent menagerie of wild beasts, boys and women. He lamented the city's decay and its vassalage to Austria. Yet, like all those who love Venice, he saw it as much more than a collection of old buildings. "She to me / Was as a fairy city of the heart". Venice produced for him, as it was to do for so many visitors of the 19th century - Turgenev, Proust, Ruskin - a mystic Sehnsucht, and if it does not produce this effect on us even now, with all the modern tourism and the ugliness that goes with it, there is something missing in us.

Ruskin's Venice, of course, was a rather different place from anyone else's before or since his many visits there. He regarded it as a symbol of fallen beauty, fallen taste, lost faith. He described it as "a ghost upon the sands of the sea - so weak - so quiet - so bereft of all but her loveliness that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City and which the Shadow".

Nevertheless, Ruskin saw the "Fall" of Venice, its fall from grace that is, as having begun as long ago as 1418. He was a Gothic purist who hated Palladian and Baroque Venice. The great domed church of the Salute was for him an excrescence. Walking daily with his sketchbook and noting the crumbling details of the great Gothic and Byzantine buildings, however, such as the Doge's palace and the Cathedral of St Mark's, Ruskin was capturing the last glimpses of something infinitely fragile. Long before there was a Green Party, and long before the devastation caused by war and modernism of the 20th century, Ruskin saw the industrial capitalist world as a wrecker of beauty, a despoiler of the soul of Catholic Europe. How much of its religion he actually believed we shall probably never know. He had absolute Doubt, followed by a mysterious period of something like faith, in which the souls of the beloved dead were somehow revealed through Venetian paintings and architecture.

For him, the West Front of San Marco was "as lovely a dream as ever filled human imagination". It is the dream that counts. For some writers, the dream has been associated with putrescence, death and decay - as in Thomas Mann's great novella Death in Venice.

For others, the lure of the sordid that Venice has always held out could be relished. The best kinky-sick Venetian book known to me is Baron Corvo's wonderful The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, A Romance of Modern Venice, written largely in 1909. The hero tells God, "I am sick of this life," and he finds Venice the perfect backdrop to his sickness.

Those whose tastes run to purple prose describing the night sky over canals, to outbursts of saccharine piety interspersed with scarcely disguised pederasty, real learning juxtaposed with pseudery and chicanery, lust, Catholicism and positively violent outbursts of misanthropic bile, will find this a highly satisfactory read, as we bob along in our imagination's gondola - "The bark swam easily and gently. Zildo's slender richness, finely poised against the limitless sky, swayed and retired, dark-blue on blue. The glitter of his eyes in the moonlight, the gleam of his teeth, the white triangle of his guernsey, came clean from shade. Nicholas made no task of thinking: he was content to let thoughts come and go." Quite so.